Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  Whatever the newly urbanised working-class population may have felt about the rural life they had abandoned, middle-class writers and social reformers began holding up the English countryside as a source of aesthetic and moral ideals. The contrast between a simple, innocent pastoral world and a sophisticated and corrupt urban one had been common literary currency in Europe for many centuries, stretching back to the Ancient Greeks. A countryside in which shepherds and goatherds stood around decoratively among their flocks, piping merrily or discussing the gods and muses, clearly bore little relation to the agricultural realities of Greece in the third century BC, which was when Theocritus wrote his Idylls, and the Pastoral mode from the very start described a wholly idealised landscape. The word ‘idyll’ has nothing to do with the English word ‘ideal’, but is derived from the Greek word for a short poem. It says much for the widespread notion that the perfect life was a pastoral one, however, that a word first used to describe a poem of rural life based on Theocritus’s model would be adopted to describe any period or situation characterised by absolute contentment.

  The contrast between urban and rural life in England was neatly summed up and Christianised by the eighteenth-century poet William Cowper, who declared: ‘God made the country, and man made the town’, rather as if that settled the matter. For Cowper the English countryside, to which he had retreated after suffering a breakdown, represented a peaceful and serene refuge from the thrusting life of the city: it was where a man could enjoy the therapeutic benefits of being close to, and in harmony with, nature. The deleterious effects of urban life became a national issue a century later, during the 1880s and 1890s, when anxieties arose about the physical and moral effects poverty and overcrowding in large industrial cities were having on the English race. The fact that Britain was the world’s first industrialised society may have brought economic benefits to the country as a whole, but the teeming slums of major cities showed all too vividly the human consequences of such advances. Writer-philosophers such as John Ruskin and William Morris inveighed against the dehumanising aspects of industrialisation, and novelists such as Charles Dickens, with his grimly delineated accounts of life among the urban poor, left his readers with indelible images of squalor and criminality. Almost as striking, though they provided charts and statistics rather than thrilling plots, were such sociological studies as Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, based on interviews with working people and published in four volumes between 1851 and 1861.

  By the 1880s there was widespread alarm at the seemingly unstoppable decline into crime and degradation in the poorer quarters of the capital. An inquiry conducted by the Social Democratic Federation in 1885 concluded that some 25 percent of the population of London lived in extreme poverty. The businessman and philanthropist Charles Booth suspected that these figures were an exaggeration and in 1887 embarked on his own sociological survey, eventually publishing the results in seventeen volumes as Life and Labour of the People in London (1902–03). His findings suggested that in fact one-third of Londoners were living in some degree of poverty, and his research was illustrated by maps in which individual streets were colour-coded from yellow for ‘Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy’ to black for ‘Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal’. Those areas showing large amounts of black were portrayed in such books as Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and A Child of the Jago (1896), two classics of what came to be known as ‘slum fiction’. These stories suggested that life for the London poor had changed little from that endured by Dickens’s Oliver Twist some sixty years earlier – except that there was no happy ending.

  The principal reason the English race needed to be kept fit and healthy was in order to differentiate it from the ‘inferior’ races it ruled in the British Empire, and medical examinations undergone by recruits for the Boer War suggested that those poor specimens of it packed into urban slums and rookeries were no longer fit for purpose. The notion that people in the first city of Empire (London) might be living in conditions not dissimilar to those of the native poor in the second city of Empire (Calcutta) was highly disturbing. It was evident that the rural classes were in every way far more healthy than their city counterparts, and this supported the rather more fanciful belief that the English countryside was the true repository of old English values. Something of this is apparent in E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), a novel much concerned with England and Englishness, and much influenced by Housman. Leonard Bast, the young clerk befriended by Margaret and Helen Schlegel, though not a slum-dweller, is the physically and spiritually degraded result of the population shifts of the nineteenth century. ‘One guessed him as the third generation, grandson of the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilization had sucked into the town,’ Forster writes; ‘as one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit. Hints of robustness survived in him, more than a hint of primitive good looks, and Margaret, noting the spine that might have been straight, and the chest that might have been broadened, wondered whether it paid to give up the glory of the animal for a tail coat and a couple of ideas.’

  The encroachment of the modern, with its ills as well as its benefits, was more apparent in towns and cities than in the countryside. Even so, as the nineteenth century drew on there was a concern that the English landscape itself was under threat. The Commons Preservation Society was founded in 1865 and the following year tore up the railings that had been erected around Berkhamsted Common by a local aristocrat attempting to enclose it within his own private estate. Legal proceedings were then taken to ensure that the common was retained for local people, and two of the CPS’s leading members went on to found the National Trust in 1895. The Trust acquired its first threatened building the following year, but it was always intended that the organisation should protect open spaces: it created its first nature reserve, Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire, in 1899, and acquired its first archaeological site, the Neolithic White Barrow on Salisbury Plain, in 1909. Nevertheless, in spite of the arrival of the railways, modern architecture and infrastructure had far less impact in rural areas, and when people spoke of England’s ‘unchanging landscape’ they were not altogether exaggerating.

  Traditionally there had also, until the population shifts of the later nineteenth century, been little change or movement among rural people, whose ancestors were often laid out generation after generation in the same parish churchyard. Working the land was felt (mainly by those who didn’t do it) to be far more representative of the ‘real’ England than working in a factory. The pace of rural life was thought to be more in tune with English values than the bustle of the city, the daily round and the changing seasons that characterised the English scene more perceptible amongst fields than in bustling urban streets. In the countryside the squire still stood at the apex of local society, occupying the ‘Big House’, with his staff, tenants and workers taking up fixed and appropriate positions in the hierarchy beneath him. It was not only an unchanging landscape that could be found in rural areas, but unchanging values. The countryside represented stability and continuity, the cities rupture and flux. None of this stood up to much scrutiny, of course, but nations tend to define themselves less by statistical facts than by received ideas that have a symbolic rather than a literal truth.

  These ideas were not merely sociological but cultural, reflected as much in the literature and music of the period as in population studies. In his 1890 novel The Tragic Muse, for example, Henry James provided an almost mystical notion of what rural England meant, none the less powerful for being written by an expatriate American. The novel’s protagonist is visiting his benefactor, who lives in a country town dominated by its ancient abbey and surrounded by sweet-smelling hayfields. It is a place where

  the tide of time broke with a ripple too faint to be a warning. But there was another admonition that was almost equally sure to descend upon his spirit in a summer hour, in a stroll about the grand abbey; to sink into it as the light ling
ered on the rough red walls and the local accent of the children sounded soft in the churchyard. It was simply the sense of England – a sort of apprehended revelation of his country. The dim annals of the place appeared to be in the air (foundations bafflingly early, a great monastic life, Wars of the Roses, with battles and blood in the streets, and then the long quietude of the respectable centuries, all cornfields and magistrates and vicars), and these things were connected with an emotion that arose from the green country, the rich land so infinitely lived in, and laid on him a hand that was too ghostly to press and yet somehow too urgent to be light. It produced a throb that he could not have spoken of, it was so deep, and that was half imagination and half responsibility.

  This ‘sense of England’ was fully established in the literary culture by the time A Shropshire Lad was published, and Housman’s book enacted the unwilling move from a rural life to an urban one, and the sense of loss that this entailed. This is where the perspective mentioned earlier comes in, the notion that Shropshire seems more idyllic when the Lad looks back on it from his London exile than when he was there among his doomed and unhappy fellows.

  A similar perspective is found in another very English poet, John Masefield, in such poems as ‘London Town’, first published in 1903 and collected in his Ballads and Poems of 1910. Masefield is a poet popularly associated with seafaring, but his roots were deep in the Herefordshire and Worcestershire countryside around Ledbury, where he had been born in 1878. ‘For some years, like many children, I lived in Paradise, or, rather, like a specially lucky child in two Paradises linked together by a country of exceeding beauty and strangeness,’ he wrote in his childhood memoir Grace before Ploughing. These two linked paradises were Ledbury and Bredon Hill: ‘For some blissful years I knew them both as only a child can know a country.’

  The trouble with Paradise is that you are likely to be cast out of it and, after time spent at sea, Masefield returned to England to become a clerk in London, from where, like the Shropshire Lad, he looked back longingly towards the rural life he had left behind. This is a landscape very similar to Housman’s. ‘London Town’ recognises the capital’s allure in a way Housman’s poems never do, but it is nevertheless a town the poet is ‘glad to leave behind’:

  Then hey for croft and hop-yard, and hill, and field, and pond,

  With Bredon Hill before me and Malvern Hill beyond,

  The hawthorn white i’the hedgerow, and all the spring’s attire

  In the comely land of Teme and Lugg, and Clent, and Clee, and Wyre.

  This celebration of ‘all the land from Ludlow town to Bredon church’s spire’ (an area that more or less encompasses the eastern aspect of Housman Country) is evidently strongly influenced by A Shropshire Lad: there is even a reference to ‘mill and forge and fold’, which virtually repeats the second line of ‘The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair’ (XXIII).* The poem’s tone, however, is entirely different, its rhythms unequivocally cheerful. The countryside here is still within reach and is suffused with wholly happy memories. Masefield’s is a poem of celebration rather than regret, of life rather than death.

  By contrast, Housman the Latinist would have been familiar with the tag ‘Et in arcadia ego’, first alluded to in Virgil’s Eclogues, and with the notion that it is Death who is warning ‘I, too, am in Arcadia’. This presence is felt throughout A Shropshire Lad, where even the flowering of plants and trees acts less as a herald of new life than as a memento mori. As William Archer observed in his 1898 review of the book:

  Never was there less of a ‘pastoral’ poet, in the artificial, Italian-Elizabethan sense of the word. The Shropshire of Mr Housman is no Arcadia, no Sicily, still less a courtly pleasaunce peopled with beribboned nymphs and swains. It is as real, and as tragic, as the Wessex of Mr [Thomas] Hardy. The genius, or rather the spirit, of the two writers is not dissimilar. Both have the same rapturous realisation, the same bitter resentment, of life. To both Nature is an exquisitely seductive, inexorably malign enchantress. ‘Life’s Ironies’ might be the common title of Mr Hardy’s long series of novels and Mr Housman’s little book of verse. And both have the same taste for clothing life’s ironies in the bucolic attire of an English county.

  Archer has borrowed this suggested collective title from Hardy’s 1894 volume of short stories, Life’s Little Ironies, and it is possible that Housman may have borrowed Archer’s notion of Nature the enchantress for a poem he wrote in April 1922 and published in Last Poems. It seems more than coincidental that Housman, who had read and commented on Archer’s review in advance of publication, mildly suggesting to his publisher that it ‘may create some sort of demand’ among readers, should have written a poem about ‘nature, heartless, witless nature’ that begins:

  Tell me not here, it needs not saying,

  What tune the enchantress plays …

  There are indeed similarities between Hardy and Housman in the matter, though rarely in the manner, of their writing. Max Beerbohm asked:

  How compare either of these grim two?

  Each has an equal knack,

  Hardy supplies the pill that’s blue,

  Housman the draught that’s black.

  Both men acquired a knowledge of the countryside in childhood when walking considerable distances to their respective schools, and both came to see nature as something that bewitches humans but is not to be trusted. There is one crucial difference, however. For Hardy, nature remained entirely indifferent to the sufferings of humans, resulting in what Philip Larkin (who would know) called the poet’s ‘temperamental sunlessness’. The term might equally well be applied to Housman, but although ‘heartless, witless nature’ may be indifferent to the assorted ills of Shropshire lads, it also provides a kind of solace not to be found in the urban environment:

  In my own shire, if I was sad,

  Homely comforters I had:

  The earth, because my heart was sore,

  Sorrowed for the son she bore;

  And standing hills, long to remain,

  Shared their short-lived comrade’s pain.

  This comfort drawn from nature has nothing whatever to do with traditional notions of renewal and rebirth, however; indeed, it is precisely because the year is dying with the turning seasons that it chimes with the speaker’s mood:

  And bound for the same bourn as I,

  On every road I wandered by,

  Trod beside me, close and dear,

  The beautiful and death-struck year …

  This ‘comradeship’ is contrasted with the genuine and much more distressing indifference of the speaker’s city-dwelling fellow men, those identified in poem XIV as ‘the careless people’ who pass the solitary figure by: ‘careless’ in the sense of carefree, because they do not share his anxieties; but also culpably so because they do not even notice someone in distress.

  Such indifference was presumably less upsetting for Housman himself when he went walking on Hampstead Heath in order to think out his poems. Few writers want to be approachable when they are at work, and accounts of Housman’s distracted or preoccupied air when encountered during his solitary walks suggest that this kind of ‘loneliness’ was both self-imposed and necessary to his poetry. Hampstead Heath may not have been the western brookland of Housman’s childhood, but in the 1890s, before the constant background hum of motorised traffic, it provided the poet with a means of thinking himself back into that lost landscape. It was not merely that the physical exercise of walking was conducive to writing poetry, it was that these walks took the poet across a hilly terrain, through woods and around ponds that approximated the rural world he was reimagining in his poems. The Heath was not merely conveniently close to Byron Cottage, it provided an environment far wilder than, say, Hyde Park, which would have been the nearest large open space in which to go walking had Housman remained living in Bayswater. Hampstead Heath was on the fringes of London rather than in the centre and was not hemmed in by buildings or thronged with the office workers a
nd nurses wheeling prams who frequented Hyde Park’s more manicured topography. Even in London, Housman’s kind of walking had more in common with the Romantic poets’ engagement with landscape than with leisurely strolls in fashionable parks, where stopping to talk to other people was part of the experience.

  Hark, the Empty Highways Crying

  If the Augustan poets saluted the impress of man upon the landscape – the houses he built, the gardens he laid out – then the Romantics re-embraced an untamed England in their objective to become closer to nature. The best way of doing this was by encountering it on foot. Long walks had been part of English rural life for centuries: for many people who could afford neither horse nor cart nor other form of transport, walking was the only means of getting from one place to another. Walking as a recreation, however, started to become popular in the early nineteenth century. Before that, most tourists travelled by coach or carriage, rattling from one ‘sight’ to another and seeing large tracts of the countryside only in passing. The Romantic poets were pioneers in recreational walking. As well as bringing them closer to nature, walking represented that other Romantic aspiration: freedom. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who like his friends William and Dorothy Wordsworth covered great distances when out walking, wrote of the sense of liberation felt by those who set out on foot: ‘every man his own path-maker – skip & jump – where rushes grew, a man may go’. The Wordsworths had moved to Alfoxden in Somerset in 1797 specifically to be near Coleridge, who lived a three-mile walk away in Nether Stowey. Companionable rambles in the Quantock Hills were part of the daily routine, with Wordsworth and Coleridge discussing political and literary matters, while Dorothy quietly took in the landscape, the weather, the trees and plants in order to write about them in her journal, which she began keeping in January 1798. In December 1799 the Wordsworths moved to Grasmere in the Lake District, some twenty-five miles south from where they had been born in Cockermouth, and here, the following May, Dorothy began writing another set of journals. Walking remained a feature of their life together, and had a considerable influence on Wordsworth’s poetry, from ‘Tintern Abbey’ to The Prelude, some of which absorbed and refracted Dorothy’s journals. As well as daily rambles, there were longer excursions, such as the nine-day one through the Lake District undertaken by Coleridge in August 1802.